In a heterogenous environment is it safe to export each user's home directory? This refers to configuration files across different versions of applications.

More specifically: if an office user creates a home directory with, say, Mandrake 10.0 (or 9.x) and then logs in on a different station with, say, Fedora Core 3, will different versions of Gnome/KDE/etc./Firefox/OpenOffice.org cause problems? Can the user go back and forth?

Another way of saying this: Are configuration files forwards and backwards compatible across application versions and cross-compatible across distributions?

Between distibutions, yes, and an app accessing condig files from an older version should be ok - but not vice versa. For isntance, if i login into Kde 3.3 on one terminal, then try and use KDE 3.2 - My taskbar gets all mangled and I have to rebuild it by adding all the little applets.

But I export home directories, and it tends to be ok if you try and keep the software similar on all the terminals